Lately Skype is a piece of Crap -- Skype virus???

I am having serious issues with Skype. I travel back and forth between the tropics, and I have an XP desktop in the tropics. Until a day before yesterday (June 14, 2011), the platform was quite stable. I was using Skype with a cheap webcam with no issues.

Then all of a sudden, the machine would crash. It would start to reboot in black DOS mode, and sometimes just hang until I had to remove the power cord. After repeated tries, I got it to boot in Safe Mode with networking. It still crashed at startup. I once got a blue screen.

I let the computer sit for a few hours and it started. I downloaded xrepairpro.exe and regressed the machine to a stable version of two weeks ago. Everything worked fine. The machine was stable.

Then overnight, an automatic updater must have fired. Skype crashed the machine again after it working perfectly the day before. When the machine rebooted xrepairpro was gone from the machine. Mind you it was a trial version but the weirdness persists.

I am wondering if there is such a thing as a Skype virus. I will download an earlier version of Skype, turn off automatic updater and report back. Please leave a comment if you know what is going on.